How Storage Proofs Solve Cross Chain Communication w/ Marcello Bardus (Herodotus)

Transcript

[Music] hello and welcome back to the strange water podcast thank you for joining us for another episode at this point in the history of the development of ethereum we're pretty confident about certain things for example we can be pretty assured that ethereum will scale by following the rollup Centric road map and that the ethereum endgame will have many different blockchains somehow attached to the core backbone of ethereum main net and while we can already foresee that this Paradigm is very powerful it introduces some of its own problems

namely now we've got to communicate and coordinate amongst all of these l2s in most circles the solution to the L2 communication coordination problem has already been solved we've got oracles using a combination of offchain compute and onchain contracts oracles are able to pass messages as well as assets across and through blockchains it's just a matter of building out this layer of middleware as we get more and more l2s right let's Zoom out for a minute and really think about what's special about crypto here's a quote from the Bitcoin white paper what is needed is an

electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other and without the need for a trusted third party well here's a question for you does an oracle-based solution really sound that congruent with the principle Satoshi left us with we've Bak cryptography directly into the system in order to give us trustless why do we need oracles to pass around the truth when we should be able to access and verify directly today we have the perfect guest to answer these questions and more

marchelo bis co-founder of Herodotus Herodotus is a service that provides developers and apps with the tools they need to access and verify the blockchain state directly as we discussed in this episode imagine that Herodotus provides a queriable database for l2s to directly access ethereum mainnet as well as other l2s this episode is jam-packed with huge ideas of where this industry is going from how this technology enables a new class of applications to how the inevitable prover markets are going to evolve over time anyone interested in cryptography and distributed computing

will take away so much from this episode one more thing before we begin please do not take Financial advice from this or any podcast ethereum will change the world one day but you can easily lose all of your money between now and then okay let's get to the show so before we get started into Herodotus and you know proof land um I'm a huge believer that the most important part of every conversation are the people in it so with that as like kind of a starter can you give us a little bit about who you are how you found crypto and I guess

why you didn't run away when you found crypto sure so hey uh I'm Rell I think I got into like crypto probably 2016 2015 uh actually surprisingly from uh from like the tech site uh which is uh which is pretty weird especially especially back then I was initially of course uh pretty interested in like Bitcoin how it actually works actually was looking for some libraries in C++ and here we go I found out Bitcoin core and this is what this Bitcoin thing is about and then I got into the ethereum rabbit hle and uh and here I am yeah you actually are kind of a rare breed here because most of us uh had our brains broken by Finance realized that this was a better way and

then uh just like fell further and further down the rabbit hole so I guess like going back to that time when you first heard about Bitcoin what was like special about it so initially when I always heard Bitcoin like digital money I was like okay like how does it work prob you know when you hear about something very exciting you tend to make some assumptions and my assumption was like just someone exposed like a web server and he like adding records to database I wasn't super interested because of the treas in then when I actually understood how works so I was like hm you can have some consensus you can have some redundancy it actually works you can have some system is completely independent doesn't have a single operator and that was like Fu completely fascinating to me and felt

super ignorant for just not getting that idea before so can you like just really briefly walk us through like let's say your the time after you've joined crypto you found Bitcoin core to let's say I don't know let the peak of the last uh cycle like what did you U like really just start to get involved and eventually how did you figure out that you know like storage proofs and validity proofs are like the next big unlock so um I got pretty deep into ethereum rabit um of course after some time realized that etherum is great but doesn't really scale um but then everyone was talking about like rollups layer twos some plasma Etc get pretty curious about how the systems can work

and back then uh it seemed like optimistic rollups were the way to go but some just a few people were talking about ZK rollups and that caught my attention like what even is DK and think 2018 I I I saw that okay this is this crazy idea you can prove some execution awesome then I was just like reading about it Etc trying to understand even the idea behind it um and then when those systems were like closer to production mean closer to production it's a huge word but as users we we have we had this Vision that maybe we'll have cheap fees um I think it was end of 2019 maybe early 2020 um so okay amazing we have these l2s on the horizon but what an L2 really

is okay pretty controversial question but I was like okay doesn't really extend ethereum you just create like a new chain that inherits the security of ethereum which is great but still if you deploy an application on an L2 it's still a silo ecosystem you cannot really access access L1 you cannot access other l2s and so on then I thought okay but hold on a second if is constructed in that way and if we can enforce messages between the L1 and the L2 in a valid way it me we can use the fact that everything on theum is committed in the cryptographic manone so that also means that I inherit the ability to read the state on dl2 and that's how I got into storage fs and realize wait maybe we can

even take it a step further and allow accessing arbitrary historical data so that on these l2s which provide a lot of compute we can read the state of L1 other l2s access the historical State and even go further and access not only say also transaction receipts block headers Etc so I guess we'll kind of unpack everything you just said as we talk about what Herodotus is but so just to like make sure I understand what you're saying I the the thought you were having is ethereum is awesome it's slow and barely works and is expensive we have this idea around L2 and rollup base scaling but we're kind of just like relying on inheriting the security of eth and then walking away intellectually

from the problem and your thought was look like even if we have this security we're still creating all these silos and your aha moment was like we still have all these constructions and all these pieces together but someone needs to figure out how to like connect them so that the L2 vision isn't just like the the L1 multi-chain Vision but like with this branding of ethereum is that right yeah cool all right so let's talk about um I guess look I'll I'll put this in your hands a little bit to help uh the audience just like really understand what you're building but um what makes more sense should we talk about like what are storage proofs or should we talk about what is Herodotus

maybe that's Herodotus so her is the is the company we're building like here have what this this is our logo um we're B basically building infrastructure and and tooling around storage groups um and that's our main mission because storage groups can get quite complex and also using them at scale requires infrastructure and you want to them to be used at scale because they get just substantially cheaper um so now what are storage proofs storage proofs we call them a weird combination of validity proofs and uh in most cases mer inclusion proofs that basically allow you to attest the validity of of some data and digitally prove that something ever existed in a database because the blockchain in reality is just a database

in some sense um so through executing a specific workflow and adding a lot of validity proofs and other proofs to it you end up with a storage proofs so I guess if you have maybe a Layman's understanding of how ethereum works and like what um I guess like the evm and the whole blockchain system works you know your first thought is I kind of thought the whole point of the block headers and the Merkel trees that exist directly in the blockchain give us the ability to uh like have these proving systems inherent in ethereum so can you talk a little bit about like why even though we do have block headers that are part of the protocol that is not sufficient enough to um you know get like let's say ZK or or cryptography

level assurances um when you're you know operating in environments outside of the L1 sure so maybe first off uh what the what is the block header so the block header is basically uh to put it simple it's a list that contains all the fields from the the most important fields from from a specific block such as BL number of course um State root maybe time stamp etc etc in our case we probably care about State root but of course um the state rout is not enough to access this um any piece of data because you need to First prove that an account exists and then within this account you need to prove that a specific storage slot exist but again a storage slot is a just a storage slot you probably want to access

some variables so there is like another layer of obstruction that you need to add on top of that um and then if you want to access some historical data it implies that you have to access historical block headers and because a blockchain is a block chain and it's a link list you basically have to Traverse every single block in the um in in the middle to to to to reach whatever information you want and that can get pretty expensive on the evm so that's where Z step scene and of fling computation of chain that's what you should care and then so how does Herodotus work um I guess like in the the base case before we're talking about bells and whistles is it are you guys building an offchain I guess prover that

is watching the ethereum L1 uh progress and then each time there's a new Block it's generating kind of a separate set of uh proofs that are easier to work with or or talk to me a little bit about like what is Herodotus actually doing okay so peritus we expose like I said set of tools and also infrastructure where developers can submit So-Cal queries saying hey I'm on for example Zing or stet and I want to access this information from ethereum or I'm on ethereum I want to access this information from ethereum um they Define a query saying Hey I want this information from this block Etc uh they send us such a such an API Fe and then we'll just process it and execute the

the workflow generate the proof etc etc and just notify them when the information is on chain and that they can basically access it um so that's how it works but of course um an API is is not enough because as a regular solity developer pyro developer like you don't want to think about the system where you have a user this user interacts with a contract but when he interacts with the contract you first need to hit an API Etc and for that reason we're building something that is called her turbo which is a full onchain interface which is uh actually synchronous I mean in reality everything is synchronous under the food but it makes you feel like you have an reach version of the SL load up code that

allows you to not only access the current state but also the state of like other rollups other domains and also you have this additional parameter block number so that's that that's what her auditus is okay got it so what you're saying is that as it works today it's like an offchain uh on your side is just watching all the chains and it's like building these proofs and then for the developer side it's an API completely offchain in which they send a request and then you process the request you get the information they need and then you feed them back offchain the proof and the data that they ask for so that they can verify that the data they ask for matches up with the like L1 that they

have with ethereum that they have in front of them right and then phase two what you're saying is while this construction is like totally valid this is the magic of ZK it breaks down a lot of the paradigms that like we have gotten used to which is like if you're within the evm don't leave the evm and so what you're saying is you're building Herodotus turbo which is the I think the exact same API but as a smart contract interface is that correct me some sense um because there are multiple ways you can um basically bind together the onchain word with the offchain word for example by just making a synchronous SC so you can call a contract and meet an event you catch that event off chain and

you serve the query and then after some time it's onchain but of course imagine if you're building an application based on such infrastructure that implies that the user basically has to interact twice with your system because first he needs to like request that information that will be eventually proven and then once it's on chain he will have to somehow consume it um so there you can use Herod that way but Herod D is something completely abstract the way the user who just clicks in the transaction all of the sudden this transaction has already this data injected when you think about this construction at a super high level where the developer is responsible for accessing Herodotus off chain we're talking pre-turbo here but accessing

herius and then using the data that comes from Herodotus and kind of folding it into whatever's happening on chain have you found that developers are like a little confused or squeamish about this or to me this seems a little bit like how let's say INF fura or like the RPC um construction Works in which like yes we understand that we can access the evm directly but no one really actually does that is all through these like API like services so I guess my question to you is this like a parallel construction or is this something you really have to educate people as like a a whole new construct yeah actually initially we thought that uh this approach where we just add developer and say Hey you have

an API you just he it uh you have your request ID and you just keep asking hey is the proof ready and we tell you hey the proof is ready we give you the the proof you construct the C data you call the contract and that's it we thought that this approach would work but that requires really a lot of Education it's not that simple even though this API really abstracts a lot of things like generating the all the proofs executing the workflow batching multiple things together uh it's simple but not simple enough and that's why we are building turbo that makes a lot of sense so I guess since we're talking about uh developers building on Herodotus right now I guess first before we talk about how you convince developers that they need to build these features in can you talk uh maybe give an example or two of

the type of systems that um really are become much more powerful when you have the infrastructure that herius provides like what who is the ideal customer on the development side for um this type of Technology sure so we clearly see that uh the compute problem of ethereum is getting solved today especially through Z rollups that just offer uncomparable um uncom comparably more computation than uh than than than layer one which is already great but there is another dimension to that okay I can have a lot of computing power but what do I use this compute for like I usually need some some data and data is actually being a problem and seems like it's a it's the bottle laap so if you want to

access the data without sending sending messages back and forth from one which can be very costly um you can use for example herods um and just Access Data at scale and if you have data and compute you can build super powerful applications so that's one thing we're particularly excited about but there is another dimension that um we're all building on L2 me a certain way nowadays um and very likely want to access data from one for example a token balance for a specific user and based on that token balance you will authorize like like an how would you do that today well you probably need to send um a message from L one and the user in order to send a message would have to interact with ler

one so imagine how bad the ux be you connect first your metamask you invoke a contract on L one you wait until the transaction is confirmed on the same U you you're asked to change the network you make sure that the message is delivered so you're waiting waiting waiting waiting and waiting and finally you can make another transaction it's just not such great ux and um and with Storage Pro this problem does not exist because in some sense like this L2 where is deployed can andher not only the security but also all the data present on etherium L1 and maybe to add on top of that U because all layer tws commit back to L1 it also implies that if those commitments are available in L1

you can access those commitments from another L2 so from L2 you can access other l2s which is pretty pretty nice so this the uh I'll take us on a slight little tangent here um but something that like the promise of rollups let's say which are a specific type of L2 in which not only the state route but a record of every single transaction is posted back to mainnet like we like to think that this Paradigm allows us to have you know full Sovereign control of the rollup and our assets on the rollup on ethereum Main net like at least that's the idea and then when it comes down to it like basically no rollup has permission with

withdrawals like everything is gated off while and we're all in these growth phases so it's fine whatever but I guess my question to you is as a builder and as someone who's building tools to ingest the data on the L1 are you really saying that all of the state changes and the transactions and the computation and everything that are happening on l2s are actually accessible on the L1 or is that like more of a pipe draam that we're working towards today and as long as the commitments are available we can prove it right it's more a question of like data availability who who who keeps the data so let me just be like really specific with this and I'm not trying to pick anyone I'm just pulling a roll up

off the top of my head but let's say I said I want you to recreate the arbitrum state uh just based or let's say my account balance today on arbitrum and you can only use the ethereum L1 are is the construction of everything at the point where like it might take some time and effort but you could not only do that but use Herodotus to prove it or are we still kind of a few steps away from that dream yeah absolutely you could do it because arbitr po its uh stats maybe not finalized because you need to wait for until they're finalized but you you can access them one in one if you can access them one in one you can for example access them on stet if you can access the state Roots we can prove everything everything that was ever on on arbitrum against those State

trots so I guess that that's today right where arbitrum and all rollups are posting the copy of their transactions into the evm into the call data portion but we all know the the road map of ethereum is Proto dang sharding and then DK sharding where all of this uh data the the transaction L2 data gets moved out of the evm and so can you talk a little bit about does the Dank sharding and like the blob structure change what you're able to do with herius because that that transaction data is not accessible within the evm anymore um in some sense it changes but in most cases it's not a

concern as of today why because uh what is always getting posted is the state rot and the state rot is usually enough for us to prove basically anything because what gets posted on most rollups are is either like transactions or state differences do really need the transactions to like access the state well not really we have the state Ro right so as long there as there is a party such as for to or anybody else who's just running a note for let's say optimism and we have access to the state we can generate inclusion grof right so we can access this the state route it's already on a one so we can prove everything against it so it's already quite good but with prot charting yeah like of course if you want to prove that a specific transaction was

included that might get tricky but again uh as you have access to the historic data on I one you can access historical block headers so also you can access um the the the block space route once it's available so that makes a lot of sense and um something I have a question I have for you I guess this is less for Herodotus and more for the ethereum community but in this Proto sharting dang sharting World in which these blobs do expire do you imagine that like you're going to be copying um all of this data and providing it to users like past expiry or is that not like who which types of entities do you see

filling the role that um is going to be needed once D sharting has like expiring data uh that's actually very good and interesting question like for sure her would be such an actor like it's clearly now as long as users want to access this historical blobs someone has to keep them and as we provide us proving services and we can prove any specific I don't want to use to use the word state but storage whatever was ever present on the Chain um yeah like we can prove it so we of course have to keep the data so um I think that actors such as such as Herod block explorers Etc neura Alchemy um so they're definitely interest for for some external actors to to keep this

data yeah and I think we'll see like whole new business models come I mean Herodotus that's a whole new business model that came up because of crypto itself like as we keep you know maturing these systems we figure out that there's need and if there's need then there's an opportunity to build a business so makes a lot of sense um let's so let now that we're talking about the business that you're building um to me this sounds like the the hard part computationally is um you know again getting all this data from the L1 and then making it accessible and like queriable in an API so first and foremost this this sounds like a big centralized compute um problem I guess or or

and the way to solve this is with big centralized comput so one can you talk a little bit is is that how herius is being built or are you building it more distributed and then second do you think that um these these things that we get with distributed systems sensorship resistance um like the the inability for a single Acer to change things like are these important for proving systems like Herodotus or do you so much on ZK to give you these properties that you don't really have to worry about it that's a that's a very good question so as of today we are mostly thinking about how do we Prov provide soundness um because like of course uh decentralizing the pr

I think it's um it's still a pretty open question and mostly companies building rollups are trying to solve it and um as we're pretty much focused on like providing data to rollups uh we are kind of a waiting for for them to solve this problem first like I said soundness sounds like u soundness sounds uh like more of a problem um and this is something we're we're focused on today so making sure that every piece of data that we claim is is proven is actually is actually proven and there is no way to to to to break the the the cryptographic system uh involved um in the future do we have plans yeah definitely we have plans actually one of the components is Turbo is in the future

how do we solve liess issue liess issues how do we solve censorship Etc but as of today um end of 2023 it's not really a major concern yet no and I I think um that that is what we do here in crypto is like you build the technology and then once you know it works then you start to worry about decentralizing it and I think what we're going to find with as we get more and more comfortable with ZK is like we're going to realize that there's other tools to solve these problems that are not just like I don't know put on as many computers as possible we give him a token and just like hope it kind of works so for sure cool so um yeah again I think as you said

there's like a lot of people working on this like shared sequencer um stuff but I think the other thing that's super interesting and like kind of at The Cutting Edge of distributed computing going on right now is we'll call it igen layer and reaking but just this whole concept of using cryptoeconomic forces to um achieve the same effects of decentralization without worrying about a bunch of different computers do you have any thoughts on um how like do you have any plans on um building um sorry do you have any plans on building Herodotus like into a world of reaking or is that um again just like

so far down the road map that you'll worry about it when you're worried about decentralization uh we only want to use like cryptographic systems uh we are not um planning to have any economics and uh incentives involved in our system to secure the the data feeds why uh because I think that it's it might be a problem for modularity what do I mean by modularity so if you think about it uh supply chain attacks can be can be problematic so imagine that you have an application that integrates her auditus but some specific part of our that for example uses from cryptoeconomic incentives and then this other application is integrated into something else there something else into something else and suddenly if one component of the system is weak like the entire

system is as weak as the weakest component like really want to avoid this type of situations and also for that reason we're not using uh uh in any way economic incentives in our system just just cryptography yeah I mean I have so much respect for you on that one because I think that in this space of crypto which both includes like deep cryptography and the token projects like it it's tempting to just slap a token on everything and say like any problem we have we'll fix this just by like paying out the people that are causing us a problem in the future with this fake money and I think always the right answer is like you you start with the technology you start with a cryptography you start with building a

good product and then down the line you can do whatever you want but like build a product don't build a token yeah yeah that that summarizes pretty much everything yeah cool so so um let's start like to shift this conversation over a little bit into like what a world looks like with Herodotus um just like fully out there and enabled so right before we started recording you mentioned that we're in test net phase right now so let's start there like um first like what is this test net and like what are the types of stuff you can do with it um and I guess like just for the developers listening like how do you access it sure so uh what the test is the test is going

um what you can do with prod is you can build nice applications that can access historical State on on gly uh but also we can for example deploy an application on Optimus girly or Z casing girly or St girly and access the state of layer one the state of like optimism and when whenever I see State I also mean the historical state so you can build pretty nice applications that probably never ever thought about before because some limitations of VM just simply thanks to this technology that's super interesting can you uh like expand a little bit what are the big limitations of the evm that fall away because of this technology sure um so the evm maybe lesser from ethereum so um I hope I'm

not saying anything controversial but eum is a database it's just a key value store and um the evm is pretty much limited to this key value store you can access a specific key right now and that's it and that that key you can access it only Within your own smart contract where this code is being executed which is pretty bad because first of if you're some smart contract and you want to access some arbitrary data from another smart contract that is not necessarily exposed through through like a g function you really can't do you want if you want to access some data from one block ago two blocks ago one million blocks ago you can't it's it's it's impossible you would have to use some other other Solutions like B oracles or just pass this schol this data in C data and assume it's invalid

which does not sound like a like a good idea um so that's a regular problem and another problem is that today in the world where we have a lot of Al many people talking about alre are you going to pass messages like around all the time and just create a message probably not like sounds like storage po are just a very elegant way to solve it so um yeah we invite developers to experiment with the deck and build nice applications yeah so the way that you just framed it like gave me a really good image in my head because I think the big question for people that aren't in like proof world is like I thought we figured all this stuff out with oracles like I I don't understand

why we need Herodotus like I thought this is what Oracle is for and I think what you just said is exactly correct where like if in this future where we have hundreds of l2s and thousands of l3s in order to achieve anything through oracles like everything requires these cascading of messages through these different system systems and I'm sure it's possible I'm sure chain link will remain one of like the top 10 most important protocols but like everything gets exponentially more and more complicated as we add more and more entities and like what Herodotus is doing is saying let's not mess around with messages or Pathways or entities or any of this stuff like the whole point

of crypto is it's all open and out there and like queriable like let's just provide that functionality back to the developers even though all the users have it on ether scam that's basically it I think uh it's a very valid part like the way the evm and this virtual machines running on blockchains the way they see the blockchain is completely different from the way a human being sees the blockchain and I think this is pretty much what we're trying to solve yeah cool and so okay so we're in testet right now um do we have do we know when we're going live uh actually very soon but we're first going live on on stet and soon after after we will go live on on on EVMS such as later one optimis ZK sync and so when you say you're going

live on Stark net what that means is on Stark net you'll be able to prove ethereum L1 data and then or or you're when you're going live on Stark net does that mean you're able to prove um Stark net L2 data uh you another one okay cool cool so you're what you're just talking about is the API endpoint that allows you to access it but at the end of the day we're always talking about proving stuff on ethereum L1 y cool and then I guess with that um my my immediate second question to that is what do you think about alternate l1s like I um let's just start from like forget about resources if you have unlimited

resources and time in devs like do you believe that it's important to build these same kind of tools for alternate other ones or is your thesis about this space really that that ethereum is the backbone ethereum is the settlement layer and like what's important is to support l2s on ethereum uh and like run down that route so we feel like ethereum nowadays is clearly going the direction of like a modularity and basically moving all the applications to L to which clearly creates a need for Solutions such as corus um and when it comes to Alternative layer ones such as for example Solana like salana is monolithic um do you need Solutions like like maybe maybe to access historical

data but are those Solutions as needed on Solana on eum no probably no that's why we're uh focused on etherum well what about a world in like let's say uh you want somebody on salana wants to take out a debt on whatever Solana's version of a is um using assets on ethereum L1 is there a world in which Herodotus can like facilitate that kind of not not I say it out out loud it doesn't really make a lot of sense but do you think that Herodotus has a role to play Bridging the the communication between um ethereum and non ethereum l1s uh technically this is possible however one of the reasons why we are not doing

this today is because we uh don't prove consensus we just prove that the state is indeed uh integral and data Integrity is preserved um so yeah as of today it's not possible in the future um maybe but as of today it's not a priority at all no and I I'll just like be frank with you um I I think the answer is like don't worry about salana I think the end game for salana is either it just doesn't survive or you know it shifts to becoming an ethereum L2 like it's like the perfect execution engine like what the to me I I just like every time we get into L1 Wars it blows

my mind a little bit CU like I thought the point of crypto though was that we have one credibly neutral space in which we can all compute in and like I don't really understand where we just keep doing these like ethereum killers and like this is the same ethereum but faster this is ethereum but cheaper and it's like no no no the point was we have one space one completely agree personally I'm I'm anther Maxi personally yes yeah uh yeah I hate the term ethereum Maxi because it makes it feel triable but it's just like no I thought I just thought that's what we were doing yep let's keep redundancy on on one state machine yeah yeah cool so um okay so as you said we're in test net right

now main net coming soon we're going to start on starkware and then um you listed a few other chains uh optimism Z saying main net etherum main net so um in let's fast forward to that world in which we have like multiple chains um that have access to live Herodotus do you have any like cool concept Concepts or ideas of like an app that would would be like truly cross chain that would might leverage like starkware for this part and then optimism for this part and then all you know be using data for L1 like what is a truly multi-chain world look like um now that we have this kind of like webbing infrastructure sure uh that's a great question so maybe I'll

actually give a few examples so I would start with with um something we're working on with snapshot so snapshot is building snapshot X which allows users to vote directly on chain not offchain uh but uh the problem is that gas fees on L1 are pretty high so we don't want to vote directly on L1 so what do we do uh we justlo snapshot t on on start start net where it's much cheaper um cool but the problem is that all the tokens that we used to vote and actually give me the the right to to interact with a certain contract or change the state somehow are on L1 so are we going to force the users to

breach them not really because they have to interact with L1 Etc are we going to force them to send a message no because it's the same as bridging them and then Bridge them back Etc it's just a mess so simple solution just provide the users with the proof and they can prove to the comper that hey I'm indeed they're rightful owner of those assets let me vote so that's one example so we can obviously take a um a step further and prove that hey I have this token on optim use this token on um itum L1 and the stoken on zing and based on that I can do some action without sending messages around and sending a message first from optimis to mainnet from ZK sync to Main and then from mainnet to Str that would be just

terrible so uh so that's for sure one place where Herodotus can can help uh another use case I'm particularly excited about is um how can we make ethereum like one single place and uh incentive device users to to actually go to the places where for example comput is cheaper so imagine application on on znc where uh let's say a protocol such as Unis decid okay uh all the users who actually spent on our platform more than $11,000 in dollars in gasv uh can now trade gasless on on ZK sync but first off how do we prove it well we can prove

it by just going through all the receipts and this user can provide those proofs and show hey I spent more than $1,000 in gasp in order to interact with Unis Swap and because we have native account destruction on Z casing I can have a pay master who will pay for that and the pay Master can be subsidi by by for example uni so this is something that's pretty cool right like I interact with theerum back then I spend a lot of gas and someone because of this reason will just pay for it m pretty cool it's all provable so I don't have to trust anyone uh so this is one example another example are like reputation systems so again I can prove that I did this action this action this action etc etc and another uh use case we're exploring internally is actually building some

sort of lightning Network like uh Solutions on top of on top of rollups so imagine that for example you have just a server and user making some interactions and those interactions are somehow conditioned by the state of L1 um they just keep interacting together that the user is happy because he's paying no no gas fees at all and then let's say after two weeks three weeks or even one year they decide okay it's time to settle we SLE all the transactions like on the layer two work data is super cheap because maybe we don't post it onchain at all but because we have her and we can ACC the historical State we can say okay listen that that transaction maybe more precis that interaction we entered to like a year ago uh is indeed valid

and you know you have to pay me like 10 die because of whatever reason we can build this type of system like really thanks to storage proofs and this ability to access whatever piece of State at whatever piece of time like truly enables a completely new dimension of obligations yeah man I like my mind is so exploded by just like what you the the most profound thing I think you just said there in your first example you said we're doing uh you know snapshot voting you know we could just like send a message down to L1 to see how many tokens there are U but what you said which is blowing my mind is if you're sending a a message you're that's basically the same thing as bridging anyway and so like you're not you might

as well Bridge it and I think um can you I can barely wrap my head around it can you just unpack that one comment a little bit more because I think that is like the clutch crucial piece to understanding why Herodotus is so powerful and such an unlock on top of Oracle so can you just unpack that a little bit more why is messaging the same as bridging sure uh so maybe let's talk about about what a bridge really is and how it works so a bridge ability A system that allows me to move one tokens from one place to another place but as some people say layer TOS do not exist and layer to are just like a server running somewhere and we just put proofs on top of that uh so how do we build Bridges uh we Implement a contract

on their one which accepts your tokens logs them and sends a message or maybe just writes to the state on one saying hey this guy wants to move this tokens to this chain adid amazing we have like some guy in the middle just watching for those messages and just making a claim hey yeah inde did this user deposited and log the tokens Okay cool so we can mint them on the other side that's basically a bridge um so of course it requires sending messages um so that so that's how how it works and with sour like we don't have that burden yeah and I think to me every day I'm more excited about ethereum and like this is one of these moments here because I think the the more you're able to step away and

you my friend entered this space through the tech and not the finance so I'm jealous of you but like the more you're able to step away from these just like totally bizarre concepts of like hard money and all Financial systems and all this stuff and really look at ethereum for what it is which is like a a paradigm of computing and like once you are able to pull away all this just like intellectual over head about finance and really are to start to understand ethereum is a computer and just a slow computer in which again like you you can't access like ethereum doesn't have the ability to access ethereum like we do there's no ether scan internally nothing like that and so I think um

what's like pretty amazing about what you're building is like it my question for you is like are you sure it should be a company and not like an EIP uh do actually interesting question um I think it should be a company uh why because uh the best way to generate proofs is to not have to generate them at all and that's something that our infrastructure achieves so basically receive all this requests intents however you call them uh we basically translate to a set of actions we need to take and uh then we just see okay this action that is required to execute this query is redundant because look there is another query that also requires this so or maybe you have already Pro proven this thing in the past so maybe we can

just make a look after our database and see hey yeah we have this proof that's not generated uh so that's uh that's what we provide and um this can drive the cost like significantly lower and also the latency because we have this infrastructure and we have a lot of batching Etc um and um and yeah EIP I think it's not really good idea right because someone has to keep the data at some point so do you want to really enforce like all the validators or potentially blog Builders to run this infrastructure probably not like it's just better to have someone dedicated to that and just keep the system more modul no and I meant that a little bit as a joke but um just just to highlight how kind of crucial and um necessary the

technology you're building is in order to achieve like the true World computer vision um so Point taking shouldn't be a EIP can be a can be a company but man literally everything you say kind of opens my mind to a a new thought because I never even considered the proving that you're doing to be um and I I'll jump ahead to the punchline which is like you're talking a little bit about a Marketplace here right you have intense people that want proofs and then you have provs the ability to actually run these proofs and like Herodotus has the ability to like be a little smart match up the intents with the wants like make sure there's not uh wasted like double work

but part of me is wondering like do you have the thought or the ability or the vision to open up herius to be a two-sided marketplace where you can also have a bunch of people willing to do proofs that just show up and say like what are the intents let me run the proofs for you that's a that's a good question we actually spend a lot of time thinking about it and that's one of the components we have inside too so um the basic question we we we had to answer was uh it really comes down to Pro decentralization how so how do you decentralize the pro and also some s of sequence here because like this transactions this API requests in reality just express some willingness the same way just a random string of

like bites you're sending to ethereum RPC just is a transaction but in some sense expresses some some willingness and uh in what order we should we should execute it etc etc so it really comes down to in a sense to how do you decentralize a sequencer and then how do you decentralize approver and um I think it's way too early to to think about it because again how do we usually do it like we just have a set of validators who will just compete who has the right to do that because this is how you ensure liveness but again this creates redundancy so if you want to have 10 people potentially uh starting the race who who's going to be the first at

generating this proofs like you need to incentivize them somehow so how incentivize them without introducing some some weird mechanics we just have the the user paying for it so if the user wants a redundancy of 10x he needs to pay 10x and do we know if users are really willing to pay 10x as of today no we don't so we we're not really talking this problem yet but we have some designs in mind no no fair enough I guess the a larger question would be whether or not it's right for Herodotus um we are entering a world in which it's clear there's just so so much demand for proofs and we're not even really sure what the use for proofs are yet we just know that there's going to be a lot of

people running them and I guess do you see a world in which there like let's say stakers there is just this wide diverse group of people everyone from hobbyists like myself to you know full professional proving outfits that are part of this ecosystem competing for proving work or do you think that it's going to be much more like the AWS Google Cloud Model where it's like only super professional super high fidelity like super centralized entities that are actually running the math that's uh one more amazing question so the way we like to think about it is that it depends it depends on um on a lot of factors so today we see some some Trends especially

around like Hardware proving and maybe in the future we'll see as6 specific specific to some proof systems or maybe we'll go the direction where you can just just prove everything with gpus and of course like gpus are way more accessible than a specific Asic and uh if gpus would become a thing that yeah maybe it makes sense to open it and literally allow anyone to provide those proofs and just open the open up the the repos and GitHub and just say hey yeah pull this code like set up your hardware and just participate in the network um but again if the the industry will go the direction yeah we probably need as6 and we need specialized Hardware like it's a it's a huge assumption to make

that everyone would have access to this Hardware so why would we add that much redundancy and let anyone participate is your answer the we we have no idea and the reason we have no idea is because we don't really have a good grasp on the I guess the curve of functionality to like Hardware power that's needed and wherever we ended up on that curve is going to like basically tell us how many individual participants we have in this ecosystem yeah I I think it's a very uh risky thing to to to assume how the future is going to look like in the in the next one year or two like things move way too fast especially in the ZK world yeah I mean come on two years ago we didn't even know if ZK evm was

possible yeah no I mean actually just uh let me hover on that for a moment like one of the most incredible moments for me in crypto was I think it was about a year ago now vitalic was on Bank list and the bank list guys asked him like what's the mo what's one of the most surprising things about ethereum here right at the end of 2022 and what vitalic said was I always thought that like the reason we were doing optimistic rollups was because like ZK evm was going to take forever if it was even possible and what I'm just most surprised about is we're now at the end of 2022 and I'm pretty sure we're going to see not one but two or three like fully done ZK EVMS before we've even really figured out out

how to implement fraud proofs correctly and I think that is just like such a testament to like how crazy and fast ZK is moving um so yeah please don't make any big bets cool all right so with the last few minutes here um I guess I just kind of like want to open it up to you and like help us understand like what is like the long-term endgame vision of Herodotus like we've talked so much about the opportunity to um use proofs and use this API to make accessing blockchain to other blockchains easier um I have to imagine that's not the end game for you and I have to imagine that you see applications for this technology that

are maybe outside of blockchain or bridge the gap between regular compute and blockchain compute can you talk a little bit when you're in front of VCS trying to raise that like $50 million like what is the endgame Vision that you're selling them on so we see this as data access middleware uh basically our end goal is okay ethereum is scaling it's scaling clearly horizontally by just deploying multiple l2s l3s and so on applications on etherum are still poor but come on we we it looks like we solved compute now that's Soft Data with data and computer we have amazing applications but again we are sharded so it's time to Uncharted and this is where we step in with like our proofs and and

cryptography um and what we want to do we want to make the system as as most efficient as possible so users don't really feel that there is some middleware in between it just works out of the box so it will make absolutely no difference if you're like interacting with that specific al2 or another al2 you're just from ethereum and this is what we want to see in the future and hopefully we will be part of that Evolution when I talk to my friends and especially like my non- crypto friends about the endgame of crypto every like my favorite example is like what a more exotic asset like like fracks for example like I don't imagine a world in which like my grandma is holding like a bunch of Assets in like this token

that's supposed to be a dollar called fra that's like basically riant on like one kid's like AWS account you know like I imagine the endgame of crypto being like for Grandma for the end users it's just the same as being on the internet like you have no ability to like really discern like what's crypto what's not you just know that you have an identity and you have assets and then like really everything that we're building is like six or seven layers deep under that in the same way that like every single one of us all knows that like when you type in a website you type in HTTPS but like none of us know anything about like SSL and like tcpip and uh

like DNS and DHCP and like all of this like crazy stuff that make it happen and so I like I'm I'm trying to pin you down on like this specific thing but like I I so know that um like once web 3 is truly web 3 we won't be thinking of it as distinct we'll be thinking of it in the same way as HTTP and so I guess like I'm so excited to once you get there to hear like how are you going to sell non crypto people on like the powers of like the you know ethereum plus like Herodotus and like what that allows them to do with their just like forget d apps forget any like with their applications for sure like I

think that SN is a very good example so you you don't have to Bri your asses you just like onum like okay you're interacting with to but you still like inherit it that's that's actually great um and this is like something we're aiming for like people should just be on ethereum they should just have some sort of proofs and uh they don't even have to think about it and also developers and that's one of the reasons why we are building turbo so it will be just like an En reach es load you say hey I'm on I'm deploying my application here and I want to access this data from that specific point in time or you can even go crazy in the mid future and leure write write like an SQL query and execute it and get like the summary of all your transactions man so I think

that's like such a good like punchline and like way to wrap this up is like what Herodotus is doing is not only enhancing SL load but like turning SL load into like a SQL interface for crypto and um that's not going to mean much to anyone who hasn't like actually developed smart contracts but um just like take it from us it is it's like developing on that same computer that's worse than your ti 89 that got us to the Moon in like the 60s like it's slow and terrible and doesn't work and just like these quality of life things are what it takes in order to turn this like Niche Financial gambling technology into core infrastructure for for mankind so man

I'm just so excited for what you're building and like and first we so excited for what you're building and how you're making ethereum more accessible but also so excited that you're one of the few people that are real that really saw that like cryptography the science and like this new stuff that's coming out like needs to be built into products I really like to think that today we're in a place where ethereum is basically you know like you have a microcontroller and you connect like an SD card of this microcontroller you have a little bit of compute and you you can literally like write and read from like a txt file but like layer 2s give you a nice processor where you can run a lot of

compute and Herod late the the database under the hood you don't have to like just write things like txt file you can build whatever so yeah I think uh we'll see a lot of nice applications hopefully you know what I what they love to say in like defi world is that crypto is speedrunning the history of finance and what this conversation has made me realize is that no no it's not that defi is speedrunning finance is that crypto is speedrunning the history of computation yeah that's a good way to put it cool man so I think that's a beautiful place to wrap it up so before I let you go can you just uh let everyone know like where can they find you where can they learn more about Herodotus and like if they want to get

involved and start building like what's what are the best next steps sure um so please go on our website a.de um and check out our like blogs check out our dogs at dogs. a.de um check out our nup uh which is again par to death um and yeah I think that's probably the three best places to look for updates perfect man awesome well again I'm so excited we're in testnet right now I'm so excited for U mainnet and just to again like watch ethereum transform from basically like more and more exotic financial instruments into like just a more and more like

holistically accessible and usable platform and I think that um what the types of tools that you're building and The Primitives that you're bringing to the table are are like a prerequisite to getting there so I just want to say thank you so much for um for building what you're building for taking the time to talk to us and good luck man thanks and uh likewise a